Topic: Mac marketshare

According to its quarterly PC report for the fourth quarter of 2014, research firm IDC found Apple sold some 5.8 million Macs over the three-month period, bucking an overall negative trend for the market.

The Macintosh may have posted its strongest worldwide market share yet last quarter, according to the latest estimates from IDC, which place Apple among the top five global PC vendors for the first time.

The Mac's share of the lucrative back-to-school shopping season continued its upward trajectory this year, as data released on Wednesday indicates that some 26.8 percent of the personal computers sold in the U.S. between Independence Day and Labor Day bore Apple's logo.

Sales growth for Apple's Mac platform has outpaced the PC market for the 31st time in the past 32 quarters, keeping the trend alive. But surprisingly, Apple's premium-priced computers were actually driven by growth in emerging markets last quarter, new data shows.

Apple's share of the U.S. computer hardware market slipped during the first quarter of 2014, with both IDC and Gartner seeing a year-over-year decline in worldwide PC shipments as consumers trend toward mobile.

Mac sales have continued to grow in the face of a recession and declining overall PC market, but Apple's iPhone could not escape shifting trends in the smartphone space, analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham said on Tuesday.

A new survey of IT decision makers in the enterprise found that almost half of businesses now offer their workers Macs, while the vast majority feel Apple's Mac platform is more reliable than PCs running Microsoft's Windows.

The Mac's long history of success in the education market hasn't been slowed by the introduction of Apple's more affordable iPad, as Mac sales to schools and students have instead grown since the iPad first launched in 2010.

While some pundits speculate that Mac lineup could be on the way out in favor of the iPad, Apple's traditional notebooks and desktops outpaced the overall PC market by nearly 25 percent last quarter, representing the largest margin separating the two in five years.

As PC sales continue to decline at the hands of tablets like Apple's iPad, the Mac platform is quietly growing its install base while maintaining an average selling price well above the rest of the market.

While research firms Gartner and IDC have very different projections on how Apple's Mac lineup performed in the holiday quarter, both sides can agree on one thing: PC shipments continued to shrink over the holidays, as consumers once again opted for tablets over traditional computers.

U.S. Mac sales spiked 28.5 percent year over year in the just-concluded fourth quarter of calendar 2013, according to the latest figures from Gartner, giving Apple a 13.7 percent share of its home market while the rest of the industry continues to struggle.

The latest quarterly PC market tracking data from both Gartner and IDC shows that Apple's U.S. Mac shipments shrunk in the third quarter of calendar 2013, as the overall PC market outpaced Mac hardware.

The latest data from the NPD Group shows that domestic sales of Mac computers were about even year over year in the month of April, which one analyst interprets as potentially a positive sign for Apple.